Many Wests exhibition now at Utah Museum of Fine Arts: extraordinary unprecedented collaboration of Smithsonian American Art Museum, four museums in American West

When Frederick Jackson Turner introduced American historians to his Frontier Thesis in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, very few paid attention to the significance of his proposition. It was the frontier which emboldened the “composite nationality” of Americans, Turner contended. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused … Read more

Utah Museum of Fine Arts makes spectacular choices in loans from Smithsonian American Art Museum, Art Bridges

“They chose well,” Stephanie Stebich, executive director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), says, in an interview with The Utah Review, of the paintings the Utah Museum of Fine Arts staff chose as loans made possible by two innovative programs established to share works from the nation’s most prestigious art collections. Given that UMFA had … Read more